Random and out-of-order Dad stories and pictures.  He totally thinks it's all Mom's fault my brother and I are so damn weird.

Like a lot of families in the country where there isn't garbage pick-up service, we (illegally) burned our trash in a burn barrel in the backyard.  This was a Dad job in our neighborhood.  But while all the other men burned trash once a week or so, Dad was a pyro who burned trash EVERY DAY.  He'd go around  the house and ask if there was anything in the wastebaskets in our rooms.  If there was so much as a Kleenex, he'd take it out to the burn barrel and set it on fire.  If there wasn't, he'd get depressed. 

He wouldn't just get the fire going and go back to the house, either, like the other guys in the neighborhood.  He'd stay out there a good forty-five minutes, staring at the fire, staring at the sky, poking at the fire with a charred-up old mop handle.  Mom referred to it as "your father's communing with nature," and was usually pretty glad to get him out of the house for the better part of an hour. 

One Christmas we gave him a can of spray-on hair as a joke.  He laughed and threw it in the wastebasket.  Luckily, this was the one time he didn't hang around the burn barrel after he got the fire going.  He was halfway back to the house when he heard the explosion and turned around to get gashed/burned in the forehead with a piece of shrapnel.

One of his favorite stories to tell us as children was that Ivan the Terrible asked the architect of St. Basil's Cathedral if he could build a more beautiful building.  The architect got scared and answered, "Yes."  So Ivan the Terrible had the architect's eyes spooned out. 

He'd bring this up every time Peter Jennings would report from Moscow or whenever Mikhail Gorbachov was on TV.  When later asked why he'd tell his very young children such a story, he'd say, "I don't know.  I just thought it was interesting."

His other favorite story to tell was about Boy Scout camp, where he and his cousins Dennis and David Baute had to catch a chicken and cut its head off with a rusty pocketknife for their supper.  At another campout they had to kill a turtle.  He insisted this was a requirement for getting a survival merit badge.  This made my little brother swear to never be a Boy Scout and made me rather disillusioned with the Brownies, who never got to do anything cool. 

Later on, I got a hold of a Boy Scout handbook from the 196os and there were no requirements for slaughtering animals to get any badges.  Dad seemed genuinely surprised--turns out he really did believe all those years that this was a requirement and not that his Scoutmasters were just idiotic sadists. 

We were all sitting around the kitchen table at suppertime.  I think I would have been in junior high and my brother in grade school at this point.  For some reason, Mom, my brother, and I were all talking about Fred and Barney's foot-powered stone automobile.  Dad was silent.

Dad set his fork down with a bang, and in that bitter voice that will broker no argument, said, "I quit watching The Flintstones when Gazoo came on, because then it just got stupid."

Everyone was silent for about ten seconds, then started laughing so hard they couldn't stop, Dad worst of all.

(And he was right.  It did just get stupid when Gazoo came on.)

Last summer, I called Dad to shoot the shit.  I told him I went to see the new X-Files movie the night before.  Dad began watching the show religiously shortly after I got hooked on it, entirely because "they took that short red-headed English lady scientist off SeaQuest and replaced her with that flaky bitch who can bend spoons with her mind" and there was therefore a hole in his particular television viewing habits that was ripe to be filled by Gillian Anderson.  He would never admit this, though, even though he couldn't follow a single episode's plotline, let alone the mytharc. 

Dad could barely contain his enthusiasm that there was a new X-Files movie he didn't know about--I heard my stepmom ask in the background what he just got so excited about.  And then he said, again in the bitter voice that brokers no argument, "Nowadays you can see pretty women on TV doing autopsies any night of the week, but none of them know how to do it right."  This wouldn't be weird except that Dad doesn't have a friggin' clue how to do an autopsy.

July 4, 1998.  I was a couple of days shy of turning 18 and would be going away to college in the fall; my brother was a month shy of turning 16 and would be going into his sophomore year of high school.  Our parents were at Dad's sister's place on the Illinois-Iowa border.  We decided to throw the 4th of July party to end all 4th of July parties.

Now, we didn't try to do this so our parents didn't know.  We weren't stupid--the neighbors on one side would totally have ratted us out, and the neighbor on the other side was a cop.  So we told Mom and Dad--once they were 300 miles away--that we were having a party.  They weren't happy, but figured there wasn't a whole hell of a lot they could do to stop it, and made us promise there would be no alcohol.  We said we weren't stupid; the cops were right next door. 

My friends came and brought themselves.  My brother's friends came and brought themselves.  Except for Zach Simmonds.  Zach brought half the county.  He also brought $150 to spend on fireworks. 

 At the time in Indiana, most fireworks were illegal to set off, but not to buy.  You just had to sign a form at the fireworks shop promising to take them out of state before lighting them off.  So Zach and a couple of his buddies went to the fireworks store...and came back with one package of 10 Roman candles, one package of 25 sparklers, and 1,000 bottle rockets. 

Me and a male friend (not my boyfriend) got bored with lighting off bottle rockets and blowing various things up with bottle rockets in the backyard and went to the front yard, where his station wagon was.  We were sitting in the open hatch of the trunk, just talking.  But the station wagon was old and crappy, and the hatch kept drifting down.  My friend said he wished he had something to prop it up with.  I said, "I think I know what will work," and went and dug the charred-up mop handle out of the burn barrel.

July 6th, 1998.  We'd cleaned up the place pretty good, except for the bottle rocket sticks littering the backyard.  Mom and Dad came home.  Mom was PISSED about the 1,000 charred-up bottle rocket sticks littering the backyard, and various other things she found to get pissed about.  Dad didn't say anything.  He went outside to burn trash, and came back asking where his fire stick was.

I told him I gave it to my friend Kirk, because the hatchback of his station wagon wouldn't stay up when we were in the back of it.  Dad blew a gasket about "that damn idiot boy Kirk" and me being in the back of his car.  I told him that we weren't doing anything, and if we were going to, we probably would have gone in the house to do it, considering it had things like beds and air-conditioning and no mosquitoes and wasn't 15 feet from the road and didn't have the cop next door spying on us and didn't have my little brother and all his idiot friends running through every five minutes with sparklers and bottle rockets.

Dad considered this, considered that I was probably right, but he still wanted his stick back.  I said it's an old charred-up mop handle.  Dad got mad and said it didn't matter, it was HIS mop handle, and he wanted it back.  I said I'd call Kirk later and explain that my Dad was an idiot and could he please give back the mop handle.  Dad said "there won't be a later, young lady.  I want my stick back, and I want it back now." 

I said, "He's probably working at Wendy's right now.  I'll call him tonight and get your stupid mop handle back."  Dad started to get in the car.  My brother asked where he was going.  He said he was going to go get a Frosty. 

I said, fine, I'll go to Wendy's and get your damn stick back.  So I went there.  Kirk was working the drive-thru.  I bought Dad a Frosty and went home and lied that Kirk said the stick wasn't in his car at the moment, but that he'd get it back to him soon, but that he was giving him a free Frosty to try to smooth things over.  Dad grumbled a bit but seemed to accept that, and the stick wasn't mentioned again until Christmas 2007, when I went to meet Kirk for the first time in almost a decade.  Before I left Dad's house to go to Shapiro's Deli in Indianapolis, Dad said, "And tell him he's still on my shit list, because I still want my stick back."

Federal-Mogul company picnic, Decatur County Fairgrounds, 1984.

Easter, 1986.

July 4th, 1982.  Liberty Park, Batesville, Indiana.  Yep, that's a Fu Manchu moustache, sideburns, plaid bellbottoms, polyester shirt, AND blue Addias sneakers Dad's rockin'.  You stay classy, San Diego.

May or June, 1981.

In a McDonald's in Wiesbaden, Germany, March 2000.

Circus World, Baraboo, Wisconsin, July 1986.

Niagra Falls, June, 1987.  All the way to and from we had to listen to my brother's tape of "The Alphabet People" songs.  Dad still starts twitching whenever we go I am Mr. X, I am quite complex, My hand is where my foot should be...EHHH EHHH ALL WRONG.

1987 or 1988.  He let us kids and the neighbor boys tie him to a stake with clothesline.  I don't remember why.

Disney World, 1990.  And here you can see where both my brother and me got ALL our postures and mannerisms.

July 8th, 1994.  My 14th birthday.  Yep, those are fanny packs and that's a 110 camera around my neck.

At the St. Louis Arch, 1988.  We went to visit his cousin Dennis Baute, who lived in Florissant, Missouri, for a while there.

Clifty Falls, 1987 or 1988.  Yep, he is rockin' the short sleeve dress shirt, the old man shorts, the black dress socks, AND the giant white velcro sneakers.

My First Communion day, May 1, 1988.  That suit was 10 years old then.  I'm pretty sure he still has it.

Showing off his missing tooth.  He had a partial that he kept in a Tupperware cup of water in the kitchen cabinet at night. 

I can guarantee you that Mom tried to throw this T-shirt away at least 20 times.  I can also guarantee you that it's tucked very tightly into a pair of old-man shorts.